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Last Sunday I went along to Presentation Camp London where I spent the day learning about how to improve my presentation skills.

Two particularly useful talks were given by Mike K Smith and Chris Atherton.

Giving Technical Presentations

When presenting a complex topic, such as your academic research, Mike Smith emphasized the importance of motivation. In other words, making it crystal clear why you’re talking about this particular subject and why the audience will find it interesting.

Although keeping your audience’s attention is an obvious point, how many academic presenters do that successfully? Chris Atherton discussed several ways to do this based on findings from psychology that can be boiled down to:

Less is more – people can only hang on to about four bits of unrelated information at a time.